Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered

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Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small, and local? Could a million American families get their food from CSAs? What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live?Such questions-at the heart of slow money-represent the first steps on our path to a new economy.

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money presents an essential new strategy for investing in local food systems and introduces a group of fiduciary activists who are exploring what should come after industrial finance and industrial agriculture. Theirs is a vision for investing that puts soil fertility into return-on-investment calculations and serves people and place as much at it serves industry sectors and markets.

Leading the charge is Woody Tasch-whose decades of work as a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer, and entrepreneur now shed new light on a truer, more beautiful, more prudent kind of fiduciary responsibility. He offers an alternative vision to the dusty old industrial concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when dollars, and the businesses they financed, lost their connection to place; slow money, on the other hand, is firmly rooted in the new economic, social, and environmental realities of the 21st century.

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money is a call to action for designing capital markets built around not extraction and consumption but preservation and restoration. Is it a movement or is it an investment strategy? Yes.

REVIEWS AND PRAISE

"Slow Money is right on the money."--Tim Storrow, Executive Director, Castanea Foundation, Inc.

"Every once in a while, an idea comes around that you immediately know is not only a good one, but in fact is an absolutely necessary one. Slow Money is such an idea. Money is a powerful thing and whatever we collectively put our money into goes a long way toward creating the world that we live in. So far, those choices have led to many things, including a broken world food system, where nobody knows where their food comes from or what it takes to grow it. To become so divorced from something as essential as our food has had many disastrous consequences. I have great hope that sustainable, locally based food systems will help us all in more ways than we imagine. Slow Money can play a huge role in doing this and Woody's book is an inspiration to all of us working in sustainable agriculture. I can't wait to live in a world supported by Slow Money."--Tom Stearns, President, High Mowing Organic Seeds

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Woody Tasch

Woody Tasch is the Founder and Chairman of Slow Money, a non-profit headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, with an alliance of national and international chapters. Slow Money took root in 2009 when Tasch wrote his groundbreaking book “Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered.”

Tasch is widely regarded as a pioneer of the concepts of patient capital, mission-related investing and community-building venture capital. For ten years before founding Slow Money, he was the Chairman of Investor’s Circle, a network of investors that funds startups that emphasize sustainable business practices. Tasch was founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance and Treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation during the 90s, where he had the foresight to invest $1.25 million in Stonyfield Farm, which returned 3x cash-on-cash in five years.

Tasch is now working on the sequel to his first book, revisiting the fundamental principles of Slow Money, based on the experience of the last four years launching the organization and movement. To date, Slow Money has moved $30 million into 221 small food businesses around the country, including farms, creameries, grain mills, niche organic brands, local processing, distribution and seed companies, and restaurants.

Growing Slow Money

Fast Money, Slow Money

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